Blatter Nears Last Chance to Reform FIFA, Former Adviser Says

By Tariq Panja -
Mar 28, 2012

Sepp Blatter, president of soccer’s
governing body, is nearing his last opportunity to reform the
group before it risks having changes forced upon it by
lawmakers, according to one of his former advisers.

A 13-person panel led by Swiss law professor Mark Pieth
will meet with FIFA’s board tomorrow to propose changes to the
the way it does business after criticism from sponsors, fans and
lawmakers following the 2010 selection of World Cup hosts and
Blatter’s re-election to a fourth term six months later.

Sylvia Schenk, Transparency International’s sports
specialist, advised Blatter following last May’s presidential
election. She said he needs to overhaul the Zurich-based
organization he’s run since 1998.

“It is Blatter’s last chance,” Schenk said. “If he does
not succeed, someone else will have to do it and Blatter will be
remembered as the president who left FIFA in a quagmire of
corruption.”

Sponsors including Dubai-based airline Emirates, Coca-Cola
Co. (KO) and Visa Inc. (V) expressed unease at corruption allegations
involving the soccer body, which makes more than $4 billion from
its four-yearly World Cup. Russia and Qatar won the rights for
the tournaments in 2018 and 2022 after a campaign in which two
voters were suspended after offering to sell their support to
undercover reporters. Since then almost half of the board have
either been accused or sanctioned for impropriety.

National Laws

“If it’s left to Swiss politics there will be a far
stronger action,” said Roland Rino Buechel, a member of
Parliament for the Swiss People’s Party. “The laws could change
but if they really clean up then there will less chance of
parliament acting.”

Blatter promised to publish a document by the end of last
year naming executives who profited from payments from ISL, a
marketing company that went bankrupt in 2001.

That process has been held up after two people mentioned in
the case sought court action to block publication. Pieth, who
works at the Basel Institute on Governance and investigated
corruption in Iraq’s oil-for-food program in 2004, has been
critical of the court’s failure to clear the document for
publication and hasn’t even seen it privately.

“Blatter in October promised me to see the ISL file, then
they became afraid,” said Schenk, who quit the reform program
because FIFA was paying Pieth’s institution for his work and
over concerns past wrongdoing wouldn’t be investigated. “The
disclosure is still a significant point.”

FIFA Report

Pieth declined to be interviewed until after he’s presented
the report to FIFA. He has said he would walk away from the
project if FIFA didn’t take the need for change seriously,
saying there was reputational risk associated with advising the
soccer body. His group includes former U.K. Attorney General
Peter Goldsmith, former Watergate investigator Michael J. Hershman and Seung-Tack Kim, chief operating officer of Hyundai
Motor Co. (005380)

“FIFA has to take it seriously,” Schenk said. “If not
they will see the consequences in the near future.”

Soccer’s governing body will have to change because the
Swiss population has started to pay closer attention to its
actions, Buechel said.

“What’s been going on is harming the reputation of my
country,” he said. “For a long time everybody was concerned
with banks and the usual stuff and now they see that giving
privileges to big sports federations and not telling them how we
expect them to behave won’t be accepted any longer.”